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Memories of Wooldridge Grade School
Barbara Bailey Fryrear

November 1934. I was in Miss Boyd's first grade class. Pop was delighted that her brother taught in the business school at UT. Pop taught law. Just one month into my school career, I stood in line to recite. Finally, my turn came. Excited and urgent, I opened my mouth and wet my pants. A deluge. It poured into my socks and pooled around my shoes on the floor.

Miss Boyd said, "Barbara, you could have asked to go to the restroom."

She didn't understand how much I had wanted to recite. She took me, squishing all the way, to the teacher's lounge upstairs to look through the Thanksgiving collection of donated clothes. I remember the tall windows and the bare autumn light and the boxes stacked haphazardly around the big room. Those socks. Too big. Off-white. Silky. Lasted forever to remind me. A few of that class went all the way through the University of Texas with me. I don't know if they remembered, but I do.

Later, when Judy Leon, who lived across the street from us, wet her pants at school, Pop was comandeered to pick her up and bring her home. She grew up to become a psychiatrist, and married one. I just married. Can that incident have changed my life?

We lived on Pearl Street then, across the street from the Leon's. I remember Dr. Harry Leon, Latin professor, sitting in front of the radio with a Saturday opera score in his lap. He could tell if they left out a note. We children had to shush and tiptoe past him when we came through the Leon house. On warm Saturdays with the windows open everyone could hear the opera on Pearl Street in Austin. We were deep in the Great Depression, but we were rich.

Edwina Heinsohn was the Methodist minister's daughter. Golden girl - her glowing skin, her hair. She ate half an avocado sprinkled with salt for lunch. How elegant could one be? My mother made grated carrot sandwiches for me. Or we could get vegetable soup for a nickel and a half-pint of milk in a red carton for another nickel. Or meat loaf and veggies for a nickel.

Pop loved to comment on our phys ed teacher, Miss Disch, on playground duty when he dropped me off at school in the morning. "She's quite a dish," he'd say. I have a snapshot of her and Miss Finch standing outside Wooldridge with sun grins. Guess he took it on one of those mornings. Or maybe I did with my Kodak box camera.



And then there was Miss Pansy Ludecke, the music teacher. She played "Danse Macabre" every Halloween. And told the tale of the ugly American whose suitcase came open at the train station in Paris and spilled all those liquor bottles out. She was so ugly with that long jaw she was beautiful. Intense.

And Miss Crystal who read to us of Pollyanna and the Boy with his thumb in the dike while we did endless ovals and push-pulls with pens dipped in ink bottles. I was on the lazy-hand row with a pencil banded to the back of my hand so it wouldn't roll over.

The floors in those long, tall halls of Wooldridge smelled of pine oil. In fact, the whole school building smelled of pine oil. We walked by twos down those halls, holding hands, between classes. (Lucile Gracy and her warning to me about those hall walks are a whole nother story.)

In every room there was a tiny desk especially for Minnie Merle Clifton, a midget who was one grade ahead of us, and had moved on to grander accomodations, like the chambered nautilus. Her folks were in a Christmas display all done up in costume in Scarbrough's Department Store basement. They were midgets, too. Pop was upset that they were on display, or that they had agreed to it. He was outraged that Mr. Clifton would put himself on display in Scarbrough's basement Christmas cottage. That puzzled me then, but now I think I understand.

Pop was always the shortest in class because he was passed two years forward. Just too smart to be held back with his age group. It skewed his sense of what made a real man. First was height. He admired tall men and failed to see their flaws of character. He never attained a great height. Around 5'8", I think. He graduated top of his class in UT Law School and went on to teach men and women who achieved state and national prominence. When he died, the city attorney of Irving wrote my mother to say that lawyers all over the state owed him a debt of gratitude for his teaching. That's pretty tall.

I spent Third Grade in Longfellow Elementary in Cambridge, Massachussetts. And that's a whole nother batch of memories. When we came back, we moved to Wheeler Street, the place of my childhood that defines Austin memories, though we lived there just two years. That's where I played Adventure with Jo Christian (now Jo Babich), drawing pictures and swinging like a couple of Janes in her lavender bush. The folks bought the big old stucco house on 31st Street in 1939. Though I am still in Texas and Jo is in Pennsylvania, I talked to her just this morning about the stories we are writing now.

But for all that, I was back in Wooldridge. We were studying South America in Miss Finch's fourth grade geography class, and we put on a play for the P.T.A. I must have outgrown those collection-bag socks by then. We each portrayed a country in South America. I was British Guiana and my mother gave me the catchiest line. My verse ended with, "I think I beat the Dutch." That was a saying of the time that some few people knew and no one now remembers, except me. Patricia Gray was French Guiana, and blonde Marian Johnson was Dutch, now called Suriname. I have retained some interest in those small countries ever since. Didn't Jim Jones take his followers to South America for that awful massacre? Wasn't it Guyana? Was that me? I felt invaded. And the innocence of Kool-Aid forever tainted.

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Penn House on West Avenue where I took dancing lessons from Sadie Penn Harris. It bears an historical plaque. More stories in all these places.

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Note two rockers. We had the same on Rindie Street in 1951 when we both had Cathy and Pam to rock. We had to adjust the timing of our singing to the length of the longest rocker. One of us was always off-beat, usually me.

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Corinth Davis, sister of Florence Bledsoe. Never Married. Weldon fell in love with her sight unseen from her letters. A sometime governess for Ida's children. Among others, I have a letter from her about the Indian school in Oklahoma.

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Florence Bledsoe Birge was like a second mother and best friend to Winnie. She and her husband Fred, "Aunt and Uncle Cac", lost a lot of money in the crash of 1929. For a time they had a service station near the square in Sherman. Several stories there. Aunt was lots of fun. I can still hear her exclaim, "Well, Gawd love it!" just before a hug.



Fred & Florence Birge
"Aunt & Uncle Cac"

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House on North Woods Street, Sherman, Texas. During hard times Aunt took in boarders. I spent part of my sixteenth summer in this grand old house. It was June 1944. When I heard church bells ringing in the night, Uncle Cac told me it was D-Day. Our armed forces were landing in France.

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To paraphrase Cary Grant in "Arsenic and Old Lace", "I'm the daughter of a sea cook!"

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Nancy Agnes Miles Tatum, "Grandma Tatum", was raised by members of the Fletcher family after the early death of her mother until she entered the Arkansas Female College in Little Rock. The college was owned and operated by her uncle Richard Fletcher, who was also Dean of the University of Arkansas Law School. She was graduated valedictorian of the Class of 1889. After she married, Nan taught school at Walnut Grove. She was especially fond of higher mathematics, Latin and Greek literature. After 1911, when Nan and Will divorced, she sold the farm and moved with her eight children to Little Rock. When the children were grown, she did volunteer work in homes for unwed mothers. She had deep religious convictions and took an active role in her church. Son John Wesley was named for the Anglican bishop who founded Methodism. She died May 18, 1951.

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William Milton Tatum, born December 18, 1869, attended St. John's Academy in LIttle Rock and the University of Texas at Austin. He and Nan married in Little Rock in the Second Baptist Church, then moved to Jacksonville, where Will's father practiced medicine. Will was appointed Postmaster at Totten, and Nan assisted him with the mail. They both also taught school at Walnut Grove. In Jacksonville, Will became owner-editor of a country weekly newspaper and president of the local telephone company. He was considered a progressive and scientific farmer, took an active interest in politics and ran for office of State Representative. An alcoholic, he was drunk and unable to pay the fare on a train he often rode. Ejected in a snowstorm in North Little Rock, he died of exposure twelve days after his forty-ninth birthday. He was buried at Bayou Meto Cemetery, which he had designed in 1904.

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